"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Attack on Latin

An unfortunately true story by blogger Retired Choir Director reveals the lengths to which some cretins will go to obliterate the cultural heritage of the West:

There in the sacristy was my "boss" the Liturgy Co-Ordinator/Pastoral Minister and her buddy the Senior Citizen Ministry Director. There's nothing odd about seeing them in the sacristy, what was odd was that they were RIPPING PAGES OUT OF A HYMNAL AND THROWING THEM INTO A LARGE GARBAGE CAN! The looks on their faces were priceless. They were terrified (I'm 6'6 and have been told I'm scary looking). They explained that they thought I had left and that they were just ripping out the songs they didn't want me to use anymore.

Now for those of you not familiar with the Pius X Hymnal, it has a good selection of English hymns as well as the normal Latin. As I reached into the garbage can and picked out the pages (luckily they'd only ripped pages out of 4 hymnals by the time I got there), I found that they were leaving all the English hymns (unless they had Latin on the back side of them) and were ripping out all the Latin.

When I asked them why they were doing this, they explained that they "didn't want me doing the Latin anymore" and that we had to "get the kids into the pews!"